Okham, Okham, Okham. A big frog in a small pond. A loudmouth who has a flair for condescension and name calling, but little for actually winning an argument in a place where people tend to back down from meaningless rhetoric if it is spoken in an appropriately supercilious and egotistic tone. Hell, you even have a neophyte or two who will gladly surrender their intellectual integrity (if they ever had any) in order to support you no matter how wrong you are. I can understand why someone like me would cause you to get your panties all in a wad.
After all, we have only had two real discussions and I handed you your ass on both. You clearly lost on the abortion thread, and your continued silence is testament to the fact that you aren’t going to be able to dismantle my argument on your thread discussing the constitutionality of abortion. And now, I am going to hand you your ass again here.
Let’s begin with the title that you gave to this thread:
Breakthrough Science, individual accomplishment or multiple discovery
The title itself does not reflect the substance of your original position but instead, reflects your “REVISED” opinion. And you had the nerve to call me an opportunist. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Your original position was that the great leaps forward were a result of educational programs or policy directives or some other sort of group activity.
Let’s look at the conversation again.
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Originally Posted by okham
We does there need to be "considerable profit motive"? Why not just a profit motive? Why not do it because it's the right thing to do? Why not do it for the glory of your great country? Why do we have to feel like lottery winners in order to motivate us?
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You clearly implied that there is an “us” involved in the great leaps forward. “Why do
WE need to feel like lottery winners in order to motivate
US
I then pointed out that the great leaps forward come not from “US” but from ONE OR TWO great minds.
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Originally Posted by palerider
Where do you get this "us" from. The people who posess the intellectual wattage required to even imagine the mechanism by which cold fusion, or hydrogen fuel cells, or solar panels that are an order of magnitude more efficient than what we have today, or room temperature super conductors might become a reality are not a dime a dozen. If history is any indicator, we get maybe one or two such people, in any given field, in a generation. With a one in three chance, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that our most brilliant minds, the ones who might have changed the world, died a month or so after they were conceived.
When it comes to moving our technology forward by quantum leaps, there is no us. We can't make it happen no matter how hard we try because even if we all got together and tried as hard as we could, we couldn't even imagine what the mechanisms might look like. The great leaps forward in any field come from one or two brilliant minds…
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Your reply was:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by okham
Defeatist. Don't apply your inability to conceptualize these mechanisms to the rest of us. For those of you who have a hard time with it (not everyone is of a scientific mind, and that's fine, we need artists and economists too) your role is not to come up with the next "quantum leap" but to support the folks who do get it through education and policy. If science isn't your bag, fine, but don't imply that everyone needs to understand the nitty gritty in order to move forward.
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Here it is in your own words, the quantum leaps come
from the folks who do get it through education and policy.
I then challenged you to name an instance or two where more than a couple of individuals were responsible for any great leap forward. You said that it is our job to support the folks who do get it through education an policy. Ok, name a great leap forward that has been the result of a specific educational program, or of a policy directive.
You failed to answer any of that and proceeded to provide an article which you found to be quite credible called of all things “Multiple INDEPENDENT DISCOVERY and Creativity in Science. One would think that you would get what is being inferred by the title but I guess you didn’t. MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT. Not independent multiple discoveries but MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT discoveries. The article talked about how INDIVIDUALS who had not collaborated on a particular theory or discovery sometimes arrive at the discovery at roughly the same time. You made my argument for me.
How did it get by you that the article was talking about individuals rather than groups? There were not groups at work on these ideas in separate locations but Individuals. Individuals who stood head and shoulders, intellectually, above their countrymen who made the great leaps at roughly the same time as other INDIVIDUALS who also stood head and shoulders, intellectually, above their countrymen.
If this very morning in some remote and very primitive village a man is sitting in front of a fire melting copper and decides to add a bit of tin and creates bronze, the fact that most of humanity came up with the idea several thousand years ago, doesn’t alter the fact that this primitive has made a discovery that moved the technology of his people into a new level. The fact that we have already done it doesn’t diminish the fact that that man is intellectually superior to his fellows who had not, in all their history, thought to do it.
So there you have it, the quantum leaps are almost always the result of superior intellects within their respective societies. The fact that more than one INDIVIDUAL in separate locations make a discovery at roughly the same time, or even thousands of years apart does not in any way challenge the fact that most of the great discoveries are the result of individual intellects as opposed to some sort of group effort as was your original position.
Your article acknowledges that intellect is not to be overlooked when considering the great discoveries and then theorizes that if that brilliant man had not made the discovery then someone else would have. Of course, there is no way to know, or prove that there was another person within a given society who possessed the intellectual wattage required to make the discovery. The fact remains that a certain amount of intellect is required to even conceive of an entirely new thing, much less actually create it.
Your article is also, for the most part, speaking of scientists who are working on new applications for an existing technology as opposed to the individuals who created the new technology where it didn’t exist before. Further, it completely acknowledges that in instances where a discovery is made prematurely, that is, not as a result of an ever increasing technological know-how the entire social deterministic theory breaks down.
Merton’s expanded sociological theory of genius predicts that the genius will be involved in more multiple discoveries than the ordinary scientist because of a great number of discoveries altogether. Merton cites many cases of the “multiplicity of multiples” among the great scientific thinkers. interestingly, Simonton showed that more eminent scientists are “still more likely to participate in multiples even after controlling for individual differences in the number of notable contributions.” Several authors point out that Merton’s modified social determinist position, which denies both the inevitability of scientific discovery and a unique role for individual genius, is actually compatible with a “chance” model of multiple discovery .
One thing this article, and everything else I could find with respect to the subject, is that even when great leaps are made by more than one scientist at the same time, the respective discoveries are still the result of superior intellects working on the projects in their respective locations. While there are plenty of examples of teams working on, and making new uses of already existing technology, there are precious few examples, if any, of great leaps forward being made by groups of people working together as was your original position when you argued that “
folks who do get it through education and policy’ are the ones who can be looked to for the future.
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